Not so great at commitment...

So for all my claims that I'd commit to blogging, I've failed spectacularly and been too distracted to do so. But I'm trying! I have some excuses, fortunately fairly legitimate ones - a newly gained broken ankle (on the same leg as the errant knee) has been a bit of a burden, although I can't really claim it made it impossible to write, as I've been sat around doing nothing since I found out about it. However, I've just accepted my place on my MPhil course with a 2:1 in my English BA(Hons) so much of the last week has been spent meeting people for goodbyes and celebrations, as much as is possible on one leg...

Anyway, back to business. I'm trying to use my time wisely, reading novels I've failed to find time for - 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' by Ken Kesey, 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' by Jonathan Safran Foer, and 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck - and now making plans to start the research for my 20,000 word research project for next year, while I have a ridiculously large amount of time on my hands.

And I'm also reading Cosmopolitan and Glamour for good measure.

Unfortunately in that list of wise uses of my time, the word 'trying' is crucial. I've spent far more time than I should have killing zombies and sleeping (not at the same time) and I can't claim I didn't enjoy those things. But now I need to do something new, and I've had a few ideas for character types and themes that I might work into something bigger.

In fact, I think I'll go and work on that now.

Yes.

So... Blogging. I'm sure there are infinite numbers of posts on the subject of starting a blog, of which mine is just another example. But, I've been promising myself I'd start writing for months and never managed to commit to it. I always end up writing something, then deciding it's too pretentious or awful and deleting it, but now I've got a long summer of nothing ahead of me so I'm going to make myself write. It's not like writing is an alien concept to me; I'm an English undergraduate student in Birmingham, and I'm waiting on my final classification to find out whether I can get a place on my chosen postgraduate course - an MPhil(B) in Literature and Modernity. So essays I can manage. The problem is finding a voice in which to write things that I think - legitimising my own rambling train of thought is an impossible task sometimes, but I need to give it a go. Otherwise I'll get to 30, have a crisis over wasted time and write a terrible trashy novel.

So. Things about me:

I'm 21, I live in Selly Oak with my hard house dj boyfriend and a few friends. I used to play the violin but I've lost all my confidence and developed a horrific feeling that I'm always just making too much noise, so the emphasis there is definitely on 'used to.' But one of the things I intend to do aside from this blog is to learn again. I have a lot of time on my hands right now - not only am I graduating in a global recession (so employment opportunities are slim to none) but I'm waiting on surgery to repair my knee, which has been solidly painful now for over two and a half years. This means every so often I go a little bit crazy (last night for instance) when the pain and even more excruciating boredom get too much. Right now I'm sitting in Cafe Gusto in the Pallasades shopping centre in Birmingham, watching people and being watched myself by a sharp-suited old man with impossibly sad eyes. I can't help but imagine why he's sad. He's alone with his briefcase and his cappuccino. Maybe he's between meetings, probably looking sad because of the aforementioned recession, which, so I'm led to believe, makes all business people sad. Maybe he's just lonely, but I'm British and so is he (probably) so I'm not prepared to risk the chance of ever so slight embarrassment in striking up a conversation with him, and I'm not sure there's a polite way of asking why his eyes are sad that wouldn't freak him out a little bit.

So I can't help much.

Another thing about me is that I purposely ignore things on the news that I think will make me sad. This obviously leads to some residual guilt about being ignorant and thus completely unable to help - I know very little about Israel and Palestine or the genocide in Darfur, and this makes me hate myself a little bit. I went through a phase when I was a teenager of wanting to save the world, reading 'No Logo' and refusing to buy sports shoes, etc... It didn't work, obviously, so I'm now posing as an ineffectual intellectual and I'm almost (almost) happy to spend the rest of my life talking about fiction.

Maybe one day I'll be more useful. But right now I have to turn down people collecting for charity because I can't afford to pay my rent.

I'm working on it though.

Working on it.